The 9/11 Wars (67 page)

As they had worked to assure a secure base for their organization, so too the al-Qaeda leadership had worked to rebuild something of the infrastructure they had lost when forced out of Afghanistan. This had taken some time, but, by 2005 and 2006, successive investigations of plots in the UK and elsewhere had revealed that al-Qaeda now had significant capacity. From 2007, the number of volunteers making their way to the FATA, particularly as the attraction of fighting in Iraq had waned, had increased sharply. Very few intelligence services had succeeded in penetrating the militants’ security procedures and infiltrating agents into al-Qaeda ranks, so most of what was learned about the situation there was still thus received second hand – and therefore heavily filtered – from the Pakistanis or was patched together from surveillance intercepts or the interrogations of men like the disillusioned Europeans who were eventually arrested in December 2008, Bryant Vinas, a twenty-six-year-old American convert detained by the Pakistanis in Peshawar in October of that year and handed over to the US authorities, and the three Germans of the ‘Sauerland cell’ who had been arrested the year before in the northern Rhine region as they made final preparations for a bombing campaign. Slowly a more detailed picture emerged of al-Qaeda’s exact set up in the FATA and its relations with many, many other groups based there.

One the most striking elements emerging from the testimony of such individuals was the sheer diversity of the international groups in the FATA in 2007 and 2008. Both Vinas and the Europeans of the ‘Belgian cell’ describe two major groups of central Asian militants, mainly Uzbek, each numbering over 1,000, various Arab groups, including al-Qaeda, each with a few hundred fighters, a Turkish group, a Uighur group and various mixed groups. On their arrival, the Belgian and French volunteers had asked to join the Arabs and had thus ended up with the Syrian Driss, they told their interrogators.
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Vinas started off with a Pakistani group, probably Lashkar-e-Toiba, active in the northern FATA, from where he had joined attacks on American troops in Afghanistan’s Kunar province before finding a contact who allowed him to approach al-Qaeda itself. The Germans had joined the smaller of the two Uzbek factions.
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These groups were loosely organized but with significant degrees of internal bureaucracy. Al-Qaeda in particular appears to have been keen on new recruits filling out forms in triplicate with all their personal information, ambitions and opinions set down. One question was: ‘What is your view of martyrdom operations? Would you participate in one?’
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Swearing a formal oath of loyalty – a
bayat
– to bin Laden was not, however, essential.

A second element emerging from the testimonies was that conditions in the tribal areas were much tougher than they had been in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, when solidly constructed camps had provided accommodation for hundreds of trainees at a time. Volunteers in the FATA in 2008 fought and trained in small groups, living in dispersed compounds, with poor food and little medical care. When one of the Belgians fell ill with malaria he was ‘left in a corner’, according to a friend’s testimony, and ‘given a jab every few days by a kid who was the little brother of the local doctor’.
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A reward for six months of good service was a trip to an internet café, from where an email could be sent home. The Belgians were allowed some chocolate to boost their flagging morale. All the different groups used the facilities of the towns of Miran Shah and Wana. ‘This bazaar is bustling with Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Russians, Bosnians, some from EU countries and of course our Arab brothers,’ one volunteer who visited the FATA around this time emailed an associate.
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Many European recruits missed female company. Vinas was arrested while in Peshawar hoping to find a wife. Others were jealous of longer-established militants who had married local women. One German volunteer appealed for female partners to travel to the FATA so the
mujahideen
there could start families of young militants who would be ‘entirely unknown to security services’.
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To participate – though not necessarily to die – in combat operations was the goal of almost all the volunteers making their way to the FATA. ‘I saw myself as a soldier for Islam, fighting on the frontline, on raids and in combat and under bombardment,’ one French volunteer later said.
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Those who did see action were deeply marked by the experience. Aden Yilmaz, a member of the Sauerland cell, told a court that he ‘savoured every moment’ of the time he had spent fighting in Afghanistan.
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When Western volunteers like Yilmaz, a Turkish national living in Germany, were deployed on terrorist operations in European countries, they often appeared to regret leaving the noise, chaos, danger and excitement of combat and the rude life on the frontlines. ‘I would have liked to have stayed there,’ Yilmaz recalled.
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Another question troubling analysts was the exact nature of the relations between al-Qaeda and the insurgent groups fighting in Afghanistan, particularly those directly loyal to Mullah Omar and the ‘Quetta Shura’, the council of senior Taliban leaders based in or around the western Pakistani city. Arab volunteers embedded in Afghan Taliban units continued to flow across the border – in the summer of 2008 up to 400 were estimated to be with Afghan insurgent units, especially those of Haqqani, bringing a new technological and tactical edge to combat, but the links between al-Qaeda and the Afghan insurgents still appeared to be loose.
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A whole series of disparate but disorganized connections and liaisons combined into ‘a working relationship based on individual personalities’ rather than a formal alliance, according to British intelligence officials.
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One key figure was bilingual Egyptian Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, who had developed a broad range of Taliban connections in the 1990s when head of al-Qaeda’s finance committee and so was able to enhance otherwise fairly haphazard cooperation between his Arabic-speaking al-Qaeda associates and the Pashtun-speaking Afghan Taliban a decade or so later.
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Al-Yazid liaised too with local Pakistani militant commanders like Baitullah Mehsud, who put their own considerable reserves of suicide bombers at al-Qaeda’s disposal, in return for monetary or other assistance, as well as sending them into Afghanistan ‘following the orders’ of the senior Afghan Taliban leadership.
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Al-Qaeda leaders also began establishing closer relations with the increasing number of individuals from Pakistani groups who were arriving in the FATA. Some had broken away from groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba which had remained focused on regional rather than global agendas. They had moved to the frontier both to evade security forces and to be able to pursue their vision of jihad unhindered. Others mixed outright criminality in Pakistan with sectarian violence and had some international involvement too when it suited them. Many retained networks in places like Bahawalpur or in Karachi. Several were suspected by Pakistani investigators of involvement in the first attempt to kill Bhutto on her return to Pakistan in October 2007. Others were thought to have provided safehouses in Rawalpindi for the successful bid to assassinate the former prime minister two months later. One key emerging figure was a veteran Pakistani militant known as Ilyas Kashmiri, who al-Yazid announced as the leader of the newly formed ‘al-Qaeda in Kashmir’. This range of volatile and complex relations was not easy for any one individual, or indeed group, to manage. The FATA appeared perhaps to be less the Grand Central Station of international militancy, as one specialist from MI6 called it, than its Grand Bazaar.

And it was a bazaar that was under attack. The Belgian volunteers referred in their testimony to hearing ‘frequent bombardments’ and learning of the death of many ‘brothers’ in air strikes. Through 2007, with hard evidence of ISI support for insurgents growing, Bush had begun to lose patience with the Pakistanis’ apparent foot-dragging and had moved to a markedly more unilateral use of drone attacks.
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This may well have been exactly what the Pakistani senior command had wanted all along. By the summer of 2008, the Americans were launching strikes without consulting Islamabad if the target was on a list of two to three dozen senior figures agreed in advance with the new civilian Pakistani government and top generals.
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The results of this shift had been seen as early as February 2008, when Abu Laith al-Liby, seen as al-Qaeda’s director of external operations, was killed. Militants, the volunteers’ testimony revealed, greatly feared some kind of computerized ‘chips’ which they believed were left by informers to guide missiles on to locations or individuals.
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Over 300 ‘spies’ died in repeated purges during the summer in part as a result, with over 100 being killed in only a couple of weeks following the death in July of Abu Khabab al-Masri, a fifty-five-year-old veteran who had run rudimentary chemical weapons tests at camps near Jalalabad prior to 9/11. Through the rest of the year such strikes intensified. The constant threat of a fiery death did not, however, dissuade some militants from enjoying the few distractions that life in the FATA offered. Vinas told his interrogators of long hikes in the company of one of the Belgian volunteers in the hills around the village where they were staying.
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Others apparently rode horses.
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As 2008’s long and violent summer turned to autumn, bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and the al-Qaeda senior leadership more generally thus continued to face a range of fairly familiar challenges. Though they had survived the loss of Afghanistan and had reconstituted a new base in Pakistan with some degree of success, the troubles they faced, on a tactical and a strategic level, were still very numerous. Chief amongst the strategic issues was their continuing failure to pull off a major attack. It had been more than three years since the bombings in London and Egypt, four since Madrid, five since Istanbul, Casablanca and the wave of violence in Saudi Arabia, six since Bali and, of course, seven years since 9/11 itself. Though the al-Qaeda senior leadership had always made it clear that they preferred rare and spectacular strikes to frequent and relatively minor ones and though 9/11 had set the bar extremely high, their apparent incapacity to fulfil their fundamental role of instigator and inciter of violence was a major problem. More broadly, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri risked slipping out of the mainstream of contemporary militancy, reduced to historic if iconic importance. Early 2008 had seen a sudden spate of videos clearly aimed at reinforcing the organization’s credibility among veteran militant activists and, more importantly, among the new generation of younger activists too. For the latter, the 9/11 strikes were often a childhood memory, and, in the highly competitive world of Islamic militancy, al-Qaeda’s senior leaders needed to continually reassert their primacy if they were not to be seen as belonging to an earlier time. The videos focused heavily on the Palestinian question, a subject to which bin Laden had returned repeatedly and which he knew had immediate and wide appeal.
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Many of the new communications were also tailored to attract a younger audience, giving a starring role to Abu Yahya al-Libi, an experienced and charismatic militant, polemicist and propagandist in his early thirties known for his escape from the high-security detention centre in Bagram airbase in Afghanistan three years before.
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Other communications were clearly aimed at offsetting the criticism of bin Laden’s leadership by the growing number of respected veteran militants. Al-Zawahiri had released a book called
The Exoneration
in March 2008, in which he inveighed at length against those who were ‘now trying to serve Crusader Zionist interests’ by ‘dragging the
mujahideen
away from the confrontation’.
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The same month, Abu Yahya al-Libi weighed in with a video in which he claimed that the recent texts of Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, the Egyptian al-Qaeda founder who had renounced violence from his prison cell, were forgeries. In May, al-Zawahiri finally responded to questions he had invited on a radical web forum six months previously. Arguing that allegations that al-Qaeda had caused the deaths of ‘Muslim innocents’ were ‘Crusader Zionist propaganda’ or due to the use of civilians as ‘human shields’, he returned to the same themes he had covered in his book, pouring scorn on his critics, in particular the veteran Muslim Brotherhood cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, calling them faithless Western stooges, apostates and hypocrites. Like bin Laden, al-Zawahiri also focused on Gaza and Palestine, rebutting the charge that al-Qaeda had not done enough to help the Palestinians directly with the argument that the group had repeatedly struck the allies of Israel.

There was another key emerging theme in communications. The central al-Qaeda leadership had always tried to tread a careful path between the local strategy entirely focused on establishing individual ‘fronts’ aimed at securing slices of liberated territory, that of the late al-Zarqawi, and the global strategy focused on provoking a broad uprising of Muslims, favoured by the now incarcerated al-Suri. The 9/11 attacks had taken the organization, against the wishes of many of its members, towards the global strategy. Since, the local had progressively returned. Al-Zawahiri, with his direct experience of militancy in Egypt in the late 1970s, had always stressed the importance of securing a solid base from which to launch further operations. If bin Laden lacked his older associate’s sense of the practicalities of clandestine violent extremism, never himself having ever been hunted through the streets of his hometown, he nonetheless recognized that the great campaign to liberate the Islamic world needed to be launched from somewhere. The question was: where? Al-Zawahiri’s various writings made clear his long-cherished hope that his native land would be the centre of the new caliphate when it was restored. Bin Laden apparently hoped it would be Saudi Arabia. However, neither had been a practical prospect in the 1990s, and nor were they now. Hopes that Iraq might fulfil the role had been dashed, at least for the moment. Nor did Afghanistan look a likely candidate in the near future. But a new possibility, barely considered previously, now presented itself. A strife-torn, chaotic country of nearly 200 million Muslims, where bin Laden and his close associates had already established an ideological and physical foothold and where they were still more popular than almost anywhere else in the Islamic world: Pakistan.